We were beside ourselves. My head reeled, as if I’d had too much to drink. I took the novels out of the suitcase one by one, opened them, studied the portraits of the authors, and passed them on to Luo. Brushing them with the tips of my fingers made me feel as if my pale hands were in touch with human lives.
- an extract from "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" by Dai Sijie (China, born 1954)
One rainy afternoon in Istanbul a woman walks into a doctor's surgery. 'I need to have an abortion', she announces. She is nineteen years old, and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life, and the lives of everyone around her.
Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse, all the Kazanci men die in their early forties, so it is a house of women, among them Asya's beautiful, rebellious mother, Zeliha, who runs a tattoo parlour; Auntie Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; widowed Auntie Cevriye, a conscientious school teacher; and Auntie Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster.
When Asya's Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to stay, long-hidden family secrets connected with Turkey's turbulent past begin to emerge.
Selected for the Creative Reading Group 2009/2010 focusing on Eastern Europe & the Middle East (for full list, type CRG4 in Search box).
"It was his belief that nationalist zeal would solely serve to replace one misery for another, inevitably working against the deprived and the dispossessed. In the end minorities tore themselves apart from the larger entity at a great cost, only to create their own oppressors. Nationalism was no more than a replenishment of oppressors. Instead of being oppressed by someone of a different ethnicity, you ended up being oppressed by someone of your own."
